A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR, the U.S. Army opened a se- cret school at the Presidio of San Francisco. Sixty students, most of them second-gener- ation Japanese-Americans, gathered Nov. 1, 1941, in an abandoned airplane hangar at Crissy Field to begin studying the Japanese language. When the first class convened, there were no desks and no chairs; students and teach- ers alike perched awkwardly on empty orange crates. Four teachers shared one Japanese typewriter. The introduction of a chalkboard represented a technological breakthrough.
As war raged, graduates of what initially was called the Military In- telligence Service Language School interrogated prisoners of war, trans- lated intercepted battle plans, and
Approximately 3,500
students attend classes at the Defense Language
Institute Foreign Language Center; 2,000 skilled
instructors cover 23 lan- guages and two dialects.
monitored enemy communication throughout the Pacific theater of operations. And, when the Japanese surrendered aboard the USS Mis- souri (BB-63) in September 1945, they were there. Over the years, the ability to un-
derstand foreign languages has con- tinued to play a vital role in national
58 MILITARY OFFICER J U LY 2012
security. Through a few moves and a handful of name changes, what is known now as the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC) has responded to the need. During the Cold War, the em- phasis shifted toward the study of Chinese, German, Korean, and Russian. In 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson began sending troops to South Vietnam, only 204 servicemembers were trained in Vietnamese. By 1972, some 20,000 personnel had studied the language at the DLI Southwest Branch at Fort Bliss, Texas; another 25,000 at- tended classes at DLI West Coast in Monterey, Calif. Just three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, the DLIFLC was training students in Dari, Pashto, and subsequently Uzbek before they shipped out to Central Asia. “Hindi just came in about five
years ago,” says DLIFLC Provost Dr. Donald Fischer, who, during a 30- year career in the military, served as the commandant of the DLIFLC from 1989 to 1993. “Punjabi was [2011]. We’re working now on an
initial curriculum for Swahili, and we’ll probably be going into Hausa,” he adds, referring to two languages spoken in regions of growing con- cern in Africa. Today, roughly 3,500 students, including active and reserve compo- nents of all branches of the military, foreign military students, and civil- ian personnel working in the federal government and various law en- forcement agencies, attend classes at the DLIFLC. They carry iPods and laptop computers. Some 2,000 skilled instructors, the vast majority of whom are native speakers, pro- vide instruction in 23 languages and two dialects at the school’s facilities at the Presidio of Monterey. Another 35,000 students are en-
rolled in various foreign-language programs the DLIFLC operates across the country and throughout the world. In Washington, D.C., training is available in some 65 dif- ferent languages through the Con- tract Foreign Language Training Program, which provides instruc- tion for Defense Attaché System personnel and military linguists spe- cializing in languages for which the demand is low. Class sizes may be as small as one or two students.
Getting the word out The growing numbers — of both stu- dents and languages — reflect more than shifting geographic security concerns. The nature of conflict and the world in which those conflicts play out has changed. “You don’t really talk so much to the local occupants when you’re rolling through on tanks,” Fischer says. “If you take a look at the Vietnam experience, if you look at Bosnia-Herzegovina, if you look at the occupations in Iraq and Afghan- istan, we’re not only fighting people, we’re also living next to them. And you have to be able to speak to the people. That’s all there is to it.”
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